Sen Bob Corker is sorry he voted for the overweight spending bill…

Watching retiring Republican politicians as they tentatively dip their toes into a puddle of Actual Reality after spending their careers vowing that the pipes were holding up just fine, thank you very much, can be an interesting sight. Here is retiring Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, who, he would have us believe, has only just now discovered that the Republican tax law he and his fellow senators just passed will balloon the deficit by a staggering $1.9 trillion dollars, according to CBO estimates.

Retiring Tennessee Senator Bob Corker (R) said that his vote on the GOP tax law could be one of the worst of his career if estimates that it will add $1.9 trillion to deficits over a decade prove correct.“If it ends up costing what has been laid out here, it could well be one of the worst votes I’ve made,” he said at a Senate Budget Committee hearing on the Congressional Budget Office estimate that produced the figure.

But Corker had a pretty good idea the bill would be a budget-buster from the outset; that’s the precise reason he withheld his support, up until the very moment when he courageously caved and voted for it anyway. He knew it. The whole party knew it. This is not the heady days of Reaganomics. We now have decades of data showing, conclusively, that tax cuts for the wealthy do little for the economy and balloon the deficit every time they are tried….